


Two by Two

by TeratoCybernetics



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, College, Crack, Non-Sgrub AU, Other, alien relationships, crackship, culture clash, dirk is terrible at people, implied threesome, karkat is a paleslut, roxy 0wns all of you, sollux is bad at hateflirting, someday i will post actual smut, this is not that day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-09
Updated: 2012-07-09
Packaged: 2017-11-09 13:01:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TeratoCybernetics/pseuds/TeratoCybernetics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She gives him a quick kiss before steering him towards the door with one hand firmly on his bony ass, and you’re left staring incredulously. How had she forgotten to tell you? “Get something that’s actually food, Sol-sweetie. Not just coffee. You get any skinnier, I won’t be able to see you, and then I'll have to get Karkat to force-feed you."<br/>“Eheheh, whatever, I’ll eat something, I promise.” What the fuck? He seems to grow aware that you’re glaring holes in him before you notice it yourself. An unreadable expression flickers across his face before he waves you off with a tiny smirk. “Later, Dick.”</p><p>(From a <a href="http://roachpatrol.tumblr.com/post/26203518509/plot-bunny-meme-part-one-more-numbersalad">plot bunny meme result</a> from someone else's dash. The idea ate my face while I was travelling.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two by Two

**Author's Note:**

> Funfact: most of this was written while at a conference on AI and Ethics in Birmingham, UK because jetlag makes with the need for silly shit to do. It started with the [last entry here](http://roachpatrol.tumblr.com/post/26203518509/plot-bunny-meme-part-one-more-numbersalad), but diverged a bit because I've decided that Sollux would be absolutely shit at hateflirting, and combining that with Dirk's what-is-emotion-how-do-I-human? makes for more fun.

Your final class for the day is out, and you make your way across the campus to meet with Roxy under a sky strewn with fiery shreds of cloud and a spattering of stars. As the sun sets, the crowds of students begin to sport more uniformly dark hair, more horns, as the Alternian students of this thoroughly modern and multi-cultural campus (they like to remind everyone of their egalitarian nature, at every possible opportunity) wake and stumble out of the dorms. The sun here isn’t as terrible as their native one, but most of them don’t adapt well to a diurnal schedule. As if to emphasize this, you bump into someone, and they growl at you, a tone somewhere between the menace of a Great Dane and an enormous cicada. Catching the hints of dusk-blue around their otherwise monotone person, you shove them back with one hand as if it’s an afterthought, continuing past. An apology to anyone over teal in their peculiar caste-system could be grounds for strife, an admittance of weakness depending on the individual, and you’re not really feeling that after a six hour lab wrangling various kinds of servos. As it is, you both continue on your respective ways without further thought.

A sharp right brings you to the technology school’s dorms. You don’t live here, you have a partially converted former garage not far from campus to house you along with your often-enormous robotics projects. Roxy’s technological interests lie more in the software part of things, so she’s living here at the computer science school, making a career of surprising professors with how much she can absorb while simultaneously appearing to not give any shits at all. You’re both in graduate programs, but she’s taking more nighttime classes than you, partly to catch up on the intersections of troll and human technology, and partly because their early classes give her more time to sober up for them.

Her door is open when you get there, and she’s sprawled on the couch, still in pajamas. Her fuzzy pink-slippered feet are propped on the knees of a gangly troll kid you’ve never seen before. He’s got his laptop closed and resting against her feet, she’s propped a book open next to her legs that she keeps glancing into, and he’s got another on the arm of the sofa. They’re both talking too low for you to hear.

“Dirk! Baby! C’mere, sit, meet Sol!” She stops and lights up in a smile as you push the door further open, picking up her books and making room. She’s drinking what smells like just coffee, for once, strong as hell and poisonously sweet like she likes it. ‘Sol’ squints at you from behind his glasses, making no move to get up. He has a sharp, clever face, absurd teeth, and disconcerting eyes, even for a troll. They‘re a lambent, featureless blue and red, one of each, and if you remember correctly, it means something. You’ve read about the weird psychic shit some of them are capable of, but had not met any of those types until now. “I’ve been trying to get him to dig tech that isn’t all gooey, and he’s been helping me with some of their weird bee shit.”

“You get the ‘weird bee shit’ better than you think you do, RX. Beenary’s a fucking pain in the ass, and I started out with it.” Then he nods at you, standing. He might be a hair taller than you are, which is impressive even if it is all bird-bones and angles. The hand he extends is tipped with sharp little claws, carefully trimmed short so as not to interfere with typing. You shake it once, and nod at him. “Sollux Captor. Compsci major, third year.”

“Dirk Strider, engineering, first year grad.” He looks like he’s thinking for a moment, then one of his brows quirk up.

“I think I’ve seen your strifing bot plans around. Some wicked shit, man, seriously. Hey, RX? I’m going to get out of here and get some breakfast with KK, just wanted to stop in before class, see how you had that hive array thing from yesterday’s lecture down.” He has a slight lisp; the rest of his diction is careful enough that you suspect it was probably far worse at one time.

“As down as dumps, Sol.” She pouts a little. “Prolly as good as I’m going to have it for tonight, though.” She stands, stretches, and...wait, what? She gives him a quick kiss before steering him towards the door with one hand firmly on his bony ass, and you’re left staring incredulously. How had she forgotten to tell you? “Get something that’s actually food, Sol-sweetie. Not just coffee. You get any skinnier, I won’t be able to see you, and then I'll have to get Karkat to force-feed you.”

“Eheheh, whatever, I’ll eat something, I promise.” What the fuck? He seems to grow aware that you’re glaring holes in him before you notice it yourself. An unreadable expression flickers across his face before he waves you off with a tiny smirk. “Later, Dick.”

You stiffen. There’s one point in your asshole register.

  


\------

 

They’ve been dating for a couple of weeks, it turns out, and after a few more brief encounters with him at Roxy’s place, you’ve determined that he drives you goddamned crazy. There’s no doubt that you’re glad she’s found someone who can stand up to her at Call of Duty, and also put up with her drunken rambling with as much patience as you and Jane do. But you also can’t help but wonder _why_ , dear god? Why _this_ particular snarky fuck? Asking around about him yields little except corroboration to what you suspect already; he’s absolutely brilliant, and knows it a bit too well, most of the time. The first part makes it even worse; if he were an idiot, you could unequivocally justify taking shots at him from the higher ground.

The first time you see him alone, it’s in the hallways. You have a couple of programming classes in the compsci building, and you’re on your way out of one when you very nearly literally run into him, a little after the rest of the lot as you’d loitered afterwards to ask about some things that have been escaping you in the translation of software to hardware. You’re shuffling through your notes, and he’s walking along reading what looks like a battered, dogeared copy of Gibson’s _Burning Chrome_ , a large crate marked ‘SILICOMB’ floating beside him, crackling with blue and red static. It’s actually kind of fascinating, at least until the crate bumps into you, electricity setting all the little hairs on your arms and neck to standing.

“Whoops. Sorry.” There’s that smirk again. He sounds like ‘sorry’ is the furthest possible state from his mind. There’s no one else in this section, somehow, and the quiet is almost a physical thing, the only sound the soft crackle of psychic energy. You maintain your best deadpan.

“I’m certain you are. I’m equally sorry you cannot possibly say ‘sorry’ correctly with your dentition.”

He grins nastily, displaying the aforementioned in all of its trapjaw glory for just a moment. Then his expression goes blank as he marks the open page in his book and sets it atop the crate, folding his hands at the small of his back. His cargo does not waver, and you wonder at the kind of mental control that goes into being telekinetic. Your lack of reaction seems to disappoint him a little, but he has that under wraps just as quickly as you had your fascination. Something tense stretches tight between you in the empty hallway as he lifts his chin slightly, staring you in your shades, then _through_ them. You return this with just a raised brow, calm as snowfall even though you can smell ozone in the hallway, even though you know that he’s not even trying, that the troll Empress used to use his kind as goddamned starship engines for a _reason_.

You measure one another in silence for long moments, before he snorts lightly, and continues on his way, the crate following like an odd and obedient pet.

 

\-----

“Oh, come ooon, Dirk! I didn’t tell you yet because I wasn’t too keen on you dissecting him like this!” She slumps against your shoulder, pouting. Her hair is freshly washed, still damp and smelling like grapefruit, and she’s wearing a decrepit Pixies shirt that would house the both of you comfortably, Black Francis’ naked ass sprawled across the front and gesturing for someone’s death. Probably yours, at this point, because your best friend in all of this world is not happy with you at the moment. Her mouth is screwed into a disappointed moue, and she’s got one hand on her hip.

You’d stopped by her dorm just to hang out, to find her in the shower. By the time she finished, you’d draped yourself across her bed, reading a copy of _Cryptonomicon_ , because her couch is covered in laundry of unknown provenance, and you can dig some Stephenson. You sat up to greet her, and the subject you’d been trying to avoid had jumped in front of the oncoming train of Roxy’s attention when she saw your reaction to the row of purpling bites down the column of her throat and leading beneath her shirt’s collar. You’d tried to cover the curled lip, but she reads you like no one else can. It’s only when you find yourself falling for her ditzy-girl schtick that she feels the need to remind you just how fucking sharp she really is, and like the asshole you are, you always dig in your heels and assert just how correct you _should be_ , because being wrong chafes like few other things do.

“He’s a douche. Completely and utterly.”

“You met him for five whole minutes, if that! Didja ever stop to think maybe he’s being a dick to you because he knows you don’t like him for no good reason? He’s sweet as Jane’s pretty cakes to me.”

“I know how to read people, Roxy.”

“You’re fuckin’ awful at people, Dirk. You know how you _want_ ‘em to work.” She gets up, retrieves a half-empty bottle of Pinot from atop her desk, her pout morphing into a full-on frown, always distressing to see on your ebullient friend. Even more so when you know it’s your fault, and you endeavour to at least look appropriately abashed, which for you generally means staring at the floor. You‘re never going to apologise for calling a spade what it is, but you want to for how this seems to affect her. Roxy takes out an enormous book on UNIX filesystems, flips through it until she finds the page she wants, and takes a drink directly from the bottle before continuing. “People aren’t your robots. You can’t crack them open and have how they work spread the fuck out in front of you.”

“You know I care for you.”

“I do, Dirk. But I’m a big girl, remember? Just...try, okay? I really like him. Give him a shot, for me.” She manages a deadly-serious face for about ten whole seconds before she snorts and giggles at her own unintentional pun, brandishing the bottle at you, and you groan and take it, and sit back down on the bed. Roxy performs a controlled swandive onto the couch, laundry be damned, and you watch, knowing you don’t actually  have to answer at this point, that her asking is a formality and she knows you’re going to. You think of middle school, and how everyone thought you were twins anyway and neither of you bothered to dissuade them of the notion. Of the boy she kicked in the crotch for harassing you because you’d rather dissect the teacher’s digital clock than play football, and helping her break into her house when her mother was off on book tours and she locked herself out. You can tally up the time you’ve known her in totaled cars, sleepovers, breakups, makeouts and screaming matches. Goddamned terrible woman owns most of your heart and she knows it entirely too well.

“Okay, but only for you.”

 

\-----

 

He’s in the cafeteria, when you finally figure out how you might execute this, going over what looks like scripting notes with a compact, solidly-built troll in a hoodie that’s at least three sizes too large for him. The short one is apparently some shade of desperate, yellow sclera showing all around bright red irises as he facepalms and grousing about something you don’t catch because he’s also gnawing on the hoodie’s pull-strings like a teething Doberman. Sollux is sprawled across two chairs and slurping at a travel mug nearly the size of his head. He’s watching his friend with a fond, mocking half-smile that’s actually kind of disarmingly sweet. You can almost see what Roxy sees in him, somewhere in there.

“Eheheh, Professor Galley gave you a C+ for this? Either he pities the fuck out of you, and I have competition, or you must’ve been on one hell of a winning streak with keeping him amused, KK.”

““I’ll give you a fucking winning streak up your nook with a broken beer receptacle, you smug and terrible nookstain of a palemate. This is going to suck so hard my _descendants_ will suddenly need a bucket without knowing why, and I’m _not even a fucking major_.” Sollux just watches, blinking calmly.

“You finished? Okay, good. Now, let me have some goddamn coffee in some semblance of peace, and then I’ll see if I can explain this in words of two syllables or less. It’s _Javascript_ , you helpless wriggler. You understand genetic biology, but not _this_? Seriously?” They both realise you’re there at about the same time. Red-eyes just glares at you, up and down, and is immediately disinterested.

“Is this sadistic fuckstick that’s been basking in the spectacle of my flailing terror a friend of yours, Captor? He kinda looks like your flushcrush.” For some reason, this one’s hostility doesn’t bother you in the slightest. It comes off more like a base operational level for him, a native language, kind of like your brother’s endlessly unwinding skeins of hyperbolic bullshit.

“Everyone in the cafeteria is witnessing your flailing. Satellites can hear you when you’re like this. And you could say that. How are things, Dick?” There’s the asshole again, quick as if someone clicked the channel.

“Dirk. And things are well.” You take a breath, then another, hoping to fuck you can manage to swallow your pride without choking on it. “I think we may have formed opinions of one another from a bad place?”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I responded poorly, before. Roxy and I are...she’s like a sister to me. There have been times when we are all each other had.” You pause to figure out what else it is you want to say, taking a deep breath. "I've never been adept at sharing..."  


“This is a joke, right?” His face goes stormcloud-dark, teeth slightly bared. It’s not exactly the reaction you had been looking for. It’s so unexpected, in fact, that you stop short.

“...What?”

“Are you seriously going to give me the ‘stay away from her’ speech? See, I suspected you were an arrogant, invasive shit from the first time I met you, because that’s just how my life is determined to unfold, but I didn’t think you’d go there. Roxy’s her own person, _Dirk_ , and I let her make her own fucking choices. For some reason, her choices happen to include being really awesome in my general vicinity and to my person.” He shakes his head, begins to gather his things. You don’t stammer, or say anything, you only watch as Sollux mutters “C’mon, KK.”, and pulls his companion to his feet. He glowers, first at Sollux, then at you, then chuckles and shakes his head, following Captor with a slight wave.

“Nice sort-of meeting you, fuckface.” You wave back out of reflex, while the rest of you attempts to figure out how you keep ending up the bad guy, here. That had not been at all what you were going to say, but you also couldn’t bring yourself to argue with him because you had wanted to do the whole overprotective sibling-surrogate thing, so very badly. In your minds’ eye, you had picked him up by the collar of his shitty, ancient Wang Computers shirt, pinning him to a wall to growl threats at him, and _w_ _hat am I, a fucking Neanderthal?_

Whatever actually unfolded here, whatever it is that he tells her, you are certain that Roxy is going to be livid.

 

\-----

 

TG: donnt tlak* talk to me until youve gotten over tihs bullshilp* blllshit* bullshit

Well, shit.

 

\-----

 

You find out where he lives from Roxy’s sister, Rose; not only does she know him, she also confesses to introducing the couple. Rose and Captor apparently have grudge-level chess matches over truly expensive scotch stolen from her mother, once every few weeks. He has a decent apartment in a shitty part of town, one of a dozen in a converted warehouse, in a neighbourhood that realtors like to optimistically call ‘transitional’. Not that anyone with teeth like his or a brain that’s also an arc reactor ever really needs to worry about being mugged.

You get out of your truck and stare at the building, at a few moths turning lazy, jagged circles around a streetlight, take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Roxy was right; you are utter shit when it comes to people, that has never escaped your attention. Sometimes it makes the disaster of when you try easier to deal with. It’s your default setting, how you’re wired, it can’t really be helped, and you made peace with that a while ago. You’ve made a life of being competent, eminently fucking capable, to the detriment of pretty much everything else, and generally, if someone can’t see past that, then fuck them.

Each unit has its own entrance, and you find 1221 around towards the back where the property abuts the wild, lush tangle along some railroad tracks. Its enormous composite window is dark, and almost hidden behind a massive stand of plants liberally sprouting hot-pink flowers.You think you remember your friend Jade having some in her own garden, calling them _Monarda_. A handful of bees, both the normal Earth kind and a few weird purple ones, doze on the flowers in the last remnants of the day’s warmth, despite that it’s nearly ten pm. You’ve brought a four-pack of a beer you were told he likes, something called La Fin Du Monde. You’re more of a Stella kind of guy, especially now that summer’s rolling around, but diplomacy must be satisfied.

Despite the lack of light or other signs of life inside, you press the buzzer and wait. You sit, watch a few cars come or go from the parking lot, stand and pace up and down the walkway, check your email on your phone. Nearly a half hour goes by before you give up, get back in your truck and start driving home again. You’re not relieved, not really disappointed, either. You’re not sure what to think about the situation, so instead of dwelling on uncertainty, you wonder who else might be up and willing to see you that might also appreciate the beer.

Slowing to a stop at a red light, you spot a half-familiar, nubby-horned figure waiting to cross the street with a battered bicycle, and laden with far too many books to be riding that thing. You roll down a window.

“Hey! You’re Sollux’ friend, correct? Want a ride home?” He looks up, and yep, it’s the short guy from the cafeteria. He blinks owlishly, and readjusts what has to be at least forty pounds of reading materials slung over his shoulder, before a decision is reached.

“Why the fuck not?" He shrugs, half optimistic, half fatalistic. "If you kill me and fuck my headless corpse, I don’t have to take this test.” You unlock the doors, open the passenger side. He sets his bag down before lifting the bike into the truck bed, then climbing into the front after his backpack. The hand he extends is large for the rest of him, broad and strong, and he’s built like a wrestler, all low-slung balance. “Karkat.”

“Dirk. Where’s home at?” He names a place that’s not far at all from where you are, but still way further than you’d ever like to bike to from campus carrying all that cargo. You map out the best way there in your head, and turn off of the route you’d usually take to your own place.

“Thanks, fuckface.”

“Not a problem. You usually have a car?”

“Nah, the ride is good for my nerves, most times. But most of the time, I’m not debating whether or not fucking suicide by self-impalement over some leisurely hours would suck less than the amount of studying I have to do. With my luck, I’d wake up in a very special hell where I’d have to do it anyway.” His head falls against the window frame, and he half-snorts, half-sighs.

“Would some beer help?” You point at the paper bag on the seat between you. “I got these to see if I could persuade your buddy to put his claws away, sit down and talk about how I managed to piss him off so thoroughly without realising it, and he’s nowhere to be found.” He just _stares_ at you, with such intensity that you wonder if you’ve now pissed this one off. Maybe you have some kind of psychic power and it’s the universal and unfortunate ability to piss off already dangerously volatile grey aliens.

Then he starts laughing. It doesn’t take very long to grow from a tentative, rasping chuckle to a full-on, doubled-over almost-cackle that drowns out NPR’s late-night classical show, tapering back off as he regains control. It’s back to an amused, intermittent noise, sitting back up and inspecting the bag’s contents before he even tries speaking again.

“I’m going to be blunt, fuckface, namely because I am absolute fucking shit at speaking delicately. It only ever gets worse when I try, and besides, I’m sick of hearing him whine. Captor’s been flirting with you.” You don’t respond, haven’t the slightest fucking idea how to respond to that. “He’s decided that you would make a fantastic rival, that you look enough like his flushcrush to tickle his weird duality fetish, and that you and him maybe should get the horizontal hate-tango on.”

You swallow, hard, and try very hard to look at the one-eighty your brain has just performed from a clear, objective place. Alternians had been living on Earth for a while, most of their cultural oddities were just that; well-known peculiarities. However, being on the receiving end of this kind of miscommunication is an entirely different thing from someone’s hamhanded, scripted joke about it in a sitcom. It’s a thing that _can_ be dangerous when someone who doesn’t know how to handle themselves wades in. It rarely is, anymore, but there’s always that chance that someone can’t operate through their involvement, doesn’t know when to stop pushing buttons or get someone to mediate.

“So this is why he’s behaving like a combination of a ten year old acting out because they’re too goddamned smart for everyone around them, and a territorial cat with magic brains?” This last gets a good snort out of him.

“Yeah, pretty much the long and short of it.” You turn into his complex, and he points you towards the end where the smaller units are. You pull over at building C, unit 68, pause and breathe.

“So. How the fuck does one respond to this?”

“Oh, holy fucking hell...Alright, come on in, welcome to Mister Vantas’ classroom, try not to drool on yourself, oh unschooled wriggler.” You both get out of the truck, and he unloads his bike, locking it to the railing by the back door. His apartment is scrupulously clean, or at least the little kitchen is. Two well-loved cast-iron skillets of differing size and depth hang above the stove, and several large glass jars contain a multitude of implements whose purpose you would be hard-pressed to identify, divided into wooden, plastic and metal. The boy apparently likes to cook.

Karkat sets down his bag on the counter, you set the beer beside it, and he hands you a church key from a drawer. “Sit, open a couple of those, and I will explain the horrible explosion-in-slow-motion that is kismessitude.”

Over the first two beers, which aren’t bad, just much stronger than you’re used to, he explains what you might call the archetypal concept of the idea, a kind of instigatory circling, a physical and mental sparring from which both participants ideally learn and grow and let out some of their aggression. Over the second two, while he’s relating the finer points of some of Sollux’ failed attempts with both trolls and humans, you learn to your own dawning horror that you’re not at all averse to the idea. Some part of you does manage to note that the beer is stronger than some wines you’ve had, and that after two bottles of Belgian high-gravity comradery, maybe some real and actual thought should be devoted to this before you dive in, headfirst.

“Can I get some water?”

“Sure, glasses are over the sink, closer to the window. 

“Why are you telling me all this?” His head lolls back a little loosely as he chuckles and scratches at his hair, his funny little horns, and you don’t feel so bad for getting a bit fuzzy. You down a pint of water, fill another glass and hand it to him.  


“Because my stupid asshole of a best friend is way too fucking stubborn to ever admit he might want advice, let alone ask for it, and because he needs someone to let loose on who can actually deal with his brand of horseshit.” The look that follows this is measuring, unsteady but calm. You wonder if he actually means you, if this is at all a good idea.  


“This has been...educational. Thanks.” You set the glass in the open dishwasher. “I’m going to leave you to your mountain of polysyllabic enzymes and catalysts and other crazy medical shit, drive home very carefully, and think about all this.”

“Thanks for the beer, Dirk.”

Avoiding any other vehicles on the way home isn’t hard, and you’re always a precise driver, beer or no. With the drivers-side window open, the night smells of exhaust and green, growing things, and maybe the sharp, grey scent of rain approaching, clearing the fog from your brain a little. You’ve reached the conclusion that the idea is appealing, and even that it might be healthier than some relationships you’ve had in that the whole point of it is venting your temper instead of tiptoeing around one another. Testing the waters in return doesn’t seem out of bounds. But how, then, to approach it? His advances, thus far, have been confrontational-but-not, threatening-but-not. Feints, and not very good ones now that you know what’s happening.

In fact, looking back on your encounters with that knowledge, Captor hateflirts like a fourth grader pulling hair and shouting 'I LIKE YOU’ before running away. You grin despite yourself; it’s all in the service of needling, he’s a windup artist, typing out a bit of code at a time, and running it to see what happens, and all he wants is a reaction to build off of.

You can work with that.

 

\-----

 

TT: I think some kind of consensus has been reached. It might not be what you were expecting, but it took me by surprise as well.

 

\-----

 

It takes two whole weeks of you not pushing the issue for him to begin to seek you out. He’s even busier now that he's started working as a research assistant for one of his professors, and your own avoidance hasn’t been completely fabricated, you’re consumed with trying to get a certain grasping mechanism to work a bit more smoothly before you have to hand it in. Still, you catch him passing by your C for Arduino labs once every few sessions, peering in through the wireglass in the door like a cat left out in the rain. You make sure to switch computers so that while passersby would easily assume you oblivious, you can see the door and hallway in any reflective surface in front of you. You don’t leave class until you’re absolutely sure he’s off at whatever his next session is, and insist on going over various concepts with the professor after class, ad nauseum.

You start taking lunch off campus and finding coffee elsewhere on your way home at night.

All of this is carefully executed, so that none of it looks like avoidance, and there’s not an ounce of fear in what you do. You are simply the living embodiment of a lack of shits given. You’ve been playing the who-will-crack-first game with your brother since forever. There were times when you didn’t speak to one another for weeks at a time, arguments that tapered away into one or both of you adopting an entirely new sleep schedule out of sheer spite, communicating only in shitty comics left on one another’s computers and which of your favourite snacks were missing, and the only reason anyone ever caved on any issue is because it often went on so long that temporal distance showed one or both of you just how stupid the argument was. You keep Karkat updated via Trollian because he finds your tactic hilarious, and you feel he deserves a little distraction from the hell that genetics and molecular biology both seem to be.

Dave was always a creature of immediacy, however, so you don’t quite plan for Captor’s ability to watch and plan ahead, nor for the fact that he possesses any patience at all. Three weeks into your little wu-wei game, he surprises you before Practical Metallurgy. When you arrive early to avoid any chance of being caught in the halls, he's there already, a dramatic figure in the darkened lab despite rotten-kneed jeans and his stupid mismatched sneakers. He’s leaning his long question-mark of a body against a counter, calm as you please, chin lifted to pin you with his attention, eyes glowing enough to make you shiver a little. You wonder just how much of it is calculated, and conclude that it’s most of it, that calculating is how he works when he’s not too busy getting ahead of himself in the interests of staying one step ahead of everyone else.

You don’t turn on the lights. Instead you set your books down, and begin walking towards him, just as unwilling to crack, or even to cave one little bit. He does not back away when you pause in front of him, wordless, dissecting any reaction you find, each blink and shift that means he’s processing, tensing, waiting. Nor does he flinch when you move even closer, past polite boundaries, past personal space, pushing the issue and pressing him against the counter. He just hisses softly, hooking fingers through your belt loops, the light of his eyes intensifying as a smug, sharptoothed smile comes and goes. You try very hard not to think about how many megatons lay cradled within that fine-boned skull of his.

“You finally got the point, huh?”

“You are the stupidest fucking genius I have ever met.”

“Likewise, Dick.” There’s a growling-rough undertone to his voice that makes your pants suddenly very uncomfortable, makes you want to either shake him until that ever-present smirk is gone, or to devour him whole. He chooses the latter when you take too long, wrapping you in bones and sinew and the scent of honey and static. His mouth tastes of that ever-present coffee of his, and his tongue seems to be lightly bifurcated. The very strangeness of that feature is thrilling, incites you try and take the reins and kiss him even more deeply, learning his movements, his features, all the little oddities. You’re going to need a new shirt after this, as his fingers have hooked into the fabric, piercing it as his claws tighten on your shoulders, stinging a little.

In answer, you take his hands and pin him by the wrists, pressing him to the counter with your greater weight before you start to explore the long lines of his throat with your tongue and teeth. He shivers, sighing, unraveling a little and leaning into the attention. Then he snickers, and everything flips, and it’s you who’s trapped, by nothing, by crawling light and implacable force, and he’s halfway peeled your shirt off so that when you hear the door to the classroom open and shut and then the lock sliding into place, you’re utterly blind. You smell grapefruit and hear a voice as familiar to you as your own.

“Oh my _goooood_ , I thought you two would never figure this shit out!”

“Roxy? What?” and “ _RX_?” happen at about the same time. You know your face is burning, and once Captor’s freed you, you try to pull your shirt back on. Roxy stops you, taking it from you and stashing it in her purse with a triumphant flourish. Then she hops up to sit on the counter between you, reaching up to stroke at the base of Captor’s horns at the same time she hauls you over by the waistband of your jeans. He’s damned near useless and you’re taking a hasty mental note of how she’s doing that when she’s slipping her hand under both your pants and boxers, squeezing at what she can get of your ass just a bit. Your brain seizes up and you  no longer understand a goddamned thing.

“Sol, sweetie, I knew what you were after from the moment I saw that shit-eating little smile on your face when I introduced you two.” She purrs into his ear, nipping at it for good measure, and he _whines_ as her fingers work deeper into his unruly hair. “Also I might have turned on the GPS in both your phones after I  sent that angry text, Dirk-baby. Been watching you two like little weather patterns on a map, just waiting for the hurricane.” She kisses you, lightly at first, then harder. Her tongue hooks deftly behind your teeth, and she knows all of your buttons and switches, how to make you melt and your knees buckle. You usually prefer males of either species, but it’s not like the two of you have never sought comfort or stress relief in one another, not like you have never been bored enough and drunk enough to fuck around, and your friendship has never suffered one bit for it. You,at least, see where she’s leading things, and hope to fuck this doesn’t burn it all to the ground.

“You’re _completely_ grubfuck shithive crazy, RX.” Sollux breathes, trepidation threading into his voice as she takes his glasses, folding them carefully  and setting them aside before she begins working at getting his shirt off. You take that from her once she gets it, begin leaving a trail of little licking bites up all of his ribs, making him arch with a sharp intake of breath. She just laughs, pure and clear, begins undoing both of your belts.

“If that’s not a ‘no’, let’s fucking do this!We don’t want to be in flagrante nekkid when your class shows up, now _do_ we, Dirk-baby?”


End file.
